 Hey guys welcome back to my YouTube channel Daniel Rossell here another video on the X840, the Canon X840 professional camcorder as I start using it and playing around with it. So I did a video earlier today on using 3.5mm microphones with this camcorder because it does have that professional top handle with your two XLR inputs and your XLR hard toggles on the other side. So that's really kind of what they're expecting, Canon's expecting people to use XLR mics but if like me you're in the process of transitioning up from a consumer camcorder and most of your mics are 3.5mm then you probably want to know where those settings are. So what I want to show in this abbreviated version of the previous video is just how to quickly toggle the levels because it took me a little bit of time yesterday to figure that out. So the first thing I've actually done is sorry I've added menu to my home screen but this function button, the left button on the LCD screen comes baked in as a thing that's there as a shortcut key that's there and that's basically all there is to it. There are then two screens that you're going to get on the function screen and it's actually I think by default it's going to start you off on Zoom. So if you get started off on Zoom all you need to do is jump down one. I'm using the joystick and that'll get you into the audio and you can see here that I have channels one and two and these are actually the internal microphones on the camcorder. Now if I go down, if you're familiar with previous versions, Canon's consumer camcorders you'll know that the kind of way they do this is A and M. A stands for automatic, M stands for manual. So if I use the joystick now to get to this I did need to I'm going to go back here. I needed to click once in order to actually be able to navigate on the screen and then I need to so the process is you move and then you click. So now I'm on automatic levels move across to M for manual click and I'm on to manual levels and now as you can see I have also got toggles left and right. This goes up to zero to 100. I find with most external microphones with Canon firstly that you have to use manual levels that's something I picked up on the Canon forums. If you just leave it on automatic your audio is going to sound pretty horrible on external microphones not with the built-in microphone. So if you're using an external 3.5mm mic go over firstly to manual and then you just need to watch the level meters and or I should say listen to with monitoring headphones because this camera does support monitoring and you know you're looking for obviously stuff that isn't clipping but stuff that also isn't too quiet and you can just go here as you can see I'm going down all the way to 13 and I think this goes up to 100 and as you can see I'm bringing the level up those levels are going to be getting higher I think we're already past the clipping point. So yeah this is zero to 100 and of course if you don't want to use the joystick and the button for whatever reason it's also touchscreen so you can just kind of go like this to manually do it. I generally find that with microphones you actually need surprisingly you want surprisingly low gain levels on the camcorder most times I've played around every mic for me is slightly different I've typically found the best results in something as low as 16, 17, 18 that kind of territory is where some of my 3.5mm shotguns sound right. This is a wrong level for what we're doing currently because it's the internal microphone but if I had a external mic lined up I'd probably be dialing it into 17, 18, 19 there abouts. If I get into the 20s to 30s I'm usually getting hissing and I'm getting clipping and both of those things are going to ruin your audio. So I hope that was useful just a quick well quick-ish guide on how to go between manual and audio manual and automatic level control on the Canon Vixia sorry on the Canon XA40 professional camcorder.